Posted
by
timothy
on Monday August 16, 2010 @04:58AM
from the junior-birdman dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The WASP, or Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform, has been built out of a hobby-grade airframe and open source Ardupilot autopilot, reports sUASnews. In the words of the Rabbit-Hole website, it's a 'Small Scale, Open Source UAV using off the shelf components. Designed to provide a vehicle to project cyber-offensive and defensive capabilities, and visual / electronic surveillance over distance cheaply and with little risk.'" Want a drone of your own? The makers have some pointers to helpful resources.

The makers of the WASP give an interview in the s7e25 episode of Hak5 [hak5.org], where they explain that the platform currently has a very tight flight envelope. It's almost always on the brink of crashing. Quote: "It flies much like a wounded harbor seal would. [...] It's a real juggling act to keep it in the air."

The meaning of "unmanned" extends to the pilot on the ground. UAVs don't have people on board and can fly more than a straight line in a controlled manner without immediate control input from a pilot on the ground. It's technically illegal to fly UAVs without visual contact in visual flight rules air space.

The FAA controls the national airspace with a white-list approach. Everything is illegal unless a specific category of safe flight has been defined. AC 91-57 [faa.gov] defines the Model Aircraft Operating Standards and creates a specific legal exemption for vehicles flown for recreational purposes. This exemption also applies to UAVs, provided they are flown for recreational purposes. However, there is no exemption for operating a UAV for commercial purposes. Even flying an R/C aircraft is illegal if the operator attaches a camera and attempts to sell the resulting aerial imagery!

The FAA recognizes that people and companies other than modelers might be flying UAS with the mistaken understanding that they are legally operating under the authority of AC 91–57. AC 91–57 only applies to modelers, and thus specifically excludes its use by persons or companies for business purposes.-- from FAA–2006–25714, Unmanned Aircraft Operations in the National Airspace System; Notice of Policy; Opportunity for Feedback (FAA link to pdf is down right now)

Technically, you or I could fly a 1:1 scale F-22 Raptor, but only if it were for recreational purposes.

I don't know if you were simply using it's to spite the troll or not but I'm fairly sure its is correct. Unlike most words the apostrophe is only added when it's a contraction of "it is", "it has" etc, not to indicate "belonging to it" (possessive). The GP was a troll to be sure, but an accurate troll nonetheless.

This is cool, I love that the science fiction future is so present in our world right now, and the power of 'it is possible, so we did it this way' I am quite amused by the quote" You don’t have to join too many dots for potential misuse." and I look forward to outrageous innovative uses by paparazzi, peeping toms, pervs, police, pyromaniacs, pilferers, pidgeon racers......

What the hell? The link is to a flash applet that displays photos. WTF? Flash is on the way out as a technology, and unnecessarily using it for a photo gallery when HTML works just fine is one of the primary sins of idiots. And the photos are what, 100x150? Boo! Boo! Bad flash, bad developers!

It would have been nice to have a few camera-bearing drones bopping around over the recent G-20 meeting in Toronto, out of the immediate reach of gentlemen with badges, batons and guns. The police seem oddly selective about video evidence they use in court and video evidence that somehow goes missing whenever the defense requests it.

There must be a way, using the Hall Effect, to read magstripes, too. Wouldn't it be fun to find out where someone bought that mouthwash, the credit card used, and whether the car being driven needs a tune-up and exceeded the posted speed limit? Perhaps there's a way to even read dental work and hidden tattoos. A UAV with more than just WiFi...

Though I'm sure "real spy drones" already have this sort of capability, along with being able to sniff other spectrums. I guess you could use it to deliver payloads to wifi clients/routers and perform automated MITM attacks, but how are you supposed to use it as an antenna extender without using another longer-range wireless system to communicate with it? Using it to locate wifi clients seems redundant as they don't have that much of a range anyway, unless you couldn't locate the access point for some reaso

Yeah, but that still doesn't allow live packets to piggyback on it - very useful, if you're trying to use it for cyberwarfare (to hack into a site) using a wifi connection. If penetrating the site through some other connection was possible, why would you use the drone in the first place? Using static pre-loaded attacks that trigger only on a certain MAC/SSID/other concievable signature would be much more limiting.

I suppose you could use a directional antenna from the ground, but you'd have to keep it stable and make it autotracking. And splice that together from off-the-shelf parts in the same price class as the drone itself, of course.

Here's the kind of shit I want to see:Drones searching for open wifi points to connect to and run BitTorrent on. Once it's completed (and seeded) the torrents, it can return to it's owner with a full drive/USB. Bonus points if it also cracks WEP and flawed WPA automatically.

As that thing does not even seem to fly and people always like to see movies, check: http://ng.uavp.ch/ [ng.uavp.ch] for a huge amount of information about NG-UAVP's (Next Generation Universal Areal Video Platform) of course all open source hard and software.

I could do this much more anonymously and inexpensively with a backpack, a laptop, a GPS, and a pair of walking shoes. UAVs attract attention because, no matter who is launching them, people are generally suspicious that they're up to no good.